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25 Jul 19 - 11:26 AM (#4002020) Subject: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: keberoxu On a BS thread, passing reference was made to the biography of Michelangelo Buonarroti and how he felt when one of his close friends died. That thread having a different topic, of sorts, I didn't want to go into Michelangelo there. So, a first for Mudcat, a thread with Michelangelo's name in the title. Yes, he wrote sonnets and madrigals, in the Tuscan vernacular of Dante, more or less today's Italian. From the time that his poetry met the light of day, there was controversy, because Michelangelo wrote passionate love poems to another man, without covering up the same-sex orientation in the language (personal pronouns in masculine gender and so on). So for centuries his poems were bowdlerized; it was only in the 1800's that editors like Cesare Guasti did the scholarship, referred to the Buonarroti archives, and published the authentic "Rime" with footnotes and annotations. With the 1900's, matters went further; by this time the Italian lyrics were being translated into I don't know how many other languages. The English writer John Addington Symonds, homosexual and resolutely so, wrote groundbreaking English translations of Michelangelo's poems. That was a hundred years ago, and if anything the poetry has been more closely studied, better publicized, since then. People who set these to music are few and far between, such as classical composers Hugo Wolf, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten. |
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25 Jul 19 - 11:36 AM (#4002021) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: keberoxu Thanks to Leeneia, who wanted more information, this thread can go into Michelangelo's literary work. John Addington Symonds' Sonnets of Michelangelo [English translation] I especially favor the one, "Love is a Refiner's Fire," page 66. |
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25 Jul 19 - 12:02 PM (#4002025) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: keberoxu Translating Michelangelo's poetry poses the choice: to rhyme, or not to rhyme? Symonds was one of the intrepid translators whose English translation rhymes and fits the meter. English translations exist that are free of meter or rhyming. With a subject like Michelangelo, this has good sense. Because Michelangelo's Italian is not graceful, masterful, or beautiful. It is like a blacksmith in the forge, hammering the [expletive-deleted] out of the red-hot iron. Much of Michelangelo's personality, as well as his genius, comes out when he writes sonnets or madrigals; the result is passionate, intense, choppy, ambiguous, rough, contradictory ... just plain difficult. Here is an English translator who makes English prose out of Tuscan sonnets. sorry, my attempt to make a link failed The Poetry of Michelangelo, Christopher Ryan, Fairleigh Dickinson University |
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25 Jul 19 - 12:36 PM (#4002031) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: keberoxu I quote this endnote from Christopher Ryan to demonstrate how Michelangelo's sexuality remains controversial to this very day. "There is a consensus today that Michelangelo was homosexual in orientation. Whether as a homosexual he led an active sexual life is another matter: for differing views compare the robustly assertive [R. J.] Clements and the more cautious [J. M.] Saslow; see also biographies,... especially those by [R. S.] Liebert, [A.] Stokes and [N.] Leites. Such evidence as we have is indirect, and inconclusive. The present writer thinks that the fairly meagre indications in the sources suggest that it is quite likely that Michelangelo was to some extent homosexually active before he moved permanently to Rome in 1534, but improbable that he continued to be so after that date; this is the less surprising in view of his close friendship[s] in Rome with with the morally and religiously orthodox Tomasso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. Saslow sets Michelangelo in the context of attitudes to homosexuality in various regions of Italy in the sixteenth century, while a detailed study of the more immediate background of homosexuality in fifteenth-century Florence is given by [M.] Rocke." -- Ryan, page 260 ... and this is only in English; imagine, if you dare, the raised voices, so to speak, in Italian, German, French, Russian ... |
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25 Jul 19 - 01:09 PM (#4002033) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: keberoxu A link to more English translations, including William Wordsworth. nine Michelangelo poems |
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26 Jul 19 - 12:14 PM (#4002166) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: leeneia Thanks, keb. I will check out the links. |
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27 Jul 19 - 05:23 PM (#4002333) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: keberoxu This Michelangelo sonnet is much enjoyed for obvious reasons. "Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel" [translator: Gail Mazur] |
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29 Jul 19 - 04:46 PM (#4002604) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: Nigel Parsons He is also quite handy with Nunchaku, and wears an orange eye-mask. Ooops, sorry, I just remember my wife trying all over Cardiff to get the character figures when our son was growing up. |
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29 Jul 19 - 04:59 PM (#4002605) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: WalkaboutsVerse "From the time that his poetry met the light of day, there was controversy, because Michelangelo wrote passionate love poems to another man, without covering up the same-sex orientation in the language (personal pronouns in masculine gender and so on)." (Keberoxu)...similar to Shakespeare's sonnets, I seem to recall. |
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31 Jul 19 - 05:03 PM (#4002847) Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well From: keberoxu Indeed, no Michelangelo thread would be complete without reference to the teenage mutant ninja turtles. Here is a by-no-means exhaustive, nor complete, list of other languages into which some (if not all) of Michelangelo's sonnets have been translated. First, would you believe, in 1595, some northern Italian (Bologna) attempted to render one sonnet in ... Latin ("Et spes annis nondum contenta peractis") English, French, and German translations began to show up in the years approaching 1800 in the common era, and in all three languages there were multiple attempts. Rainer Maria Rilke, for example, did not complete translations of all the poetry, but he worked hard at those he did translate into German, publishing his collection in Wiesbaden. From the 1800's into the 1900's, and over that turn of centuries, came translations in Polish, Hungarian, Croatian. The Russians stood up to be counted in the 1900's. A Cuban native exiled to the United States took on the challenge of Spanish translations (2012: La Cruz del Sur). Catalan translations (incomplete) date from 2010 (Edicions Vitella). Brazil was the source of Portuguese translations in 1994 (Nilson Moulin, Col. Lazuli). Stopping there, but I would be shocked if there were not translations in even more languages. |